WordPress Management – The A2 Postinghttps://www.a2hosting.com/blog
The Official Blog for A2 HostingMon, 21 Jan 2019 12:50:39 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.34 WordPress Maintenance Tasks You Should Perform Regularlyhttps://www.a2hosting.com/blog/wordpress-maintenance-tasks/
https://www.a2hosting.com/blog/wordpress-maintenance-tasks/#respondTue, 19 Jun 2018 14:34:44 +0000https://www.a2hosting.com/blog/?p=4669Running a website is, in many ways, much like running a business. Behind every successful site you visit, there’s a lot of work that goes on in the background to keep things running smoothly. Without that regular maintenance, your website might not be able to achieve its full potential. The good news is that WordPress …

]]>Running a website is, in many ways, much like running a business. Behind every successful site you visit, there’s a lot of work that goes on in the background to keep things running smoothly. Without that regular maintenance, your website might not be able to achieve its full potential.

The good news is that WordPress makes your life easier when it comes to website maintenance. Using plugins, for example, can help you automate or simplify many important tasks, such as creating backups, checking for broken links, and more.

In this article, we’re going to talk about why website maintenance is so necessary. Then we’ll introduce you to four tasks you should carry out regularly, in order to keep everything running in top shape. Let’s pop your site’s hood open!

Why WordPress Website Maintenance Is Important

Sometimes, you’ll find that your website isn’t working at full capacity. You can think about your site as a computer – if you set up too many unnecessary programs and fill it with junk, it won’t work as smoothly as it did out of the box. To avoid this eventuality, you’ll need to carry out routine maintenance on your website to keep it running well. This will benefit both you and your visitors.

WordPress maintenance isn’t just about smooth performance either – it also improves security and user experience. Certain maintenance tasks will enable you to protect your site from attacks, while others make it more friendly to your audience. Either way, it’s important to maintain your site and ensure that it’s living up to its full potential.

How to Monitor Your Website’s Loading Times

We’re going to be talking about the importance of performance and loading times throughout this article, since a lot of WordPress maintenance tasks are designed to keep your site running quickly. However, before we do that, let’s touch on how you can measure your site’s performance to find out if needs improvement.

Knowing this metric is important, because if your website takes over two seconds to load, your bounce rate will often increase. With that in mind, you should monitor your loading times periodically using a service such as Pingdom Tools. All you have to do is enter the URL of the page you want to test, select a test server, and click on Start Test:

You’ll see a results page shortly. If you’re below the two-second mark, you’re within the ‘good enough’ range. However, we’re not big fans of good enough, and there’s a lot you can do to make your site perform even better.

4 WordPress Maintenance Tasks You Should Perform Regularly

There are plenty of things you can do to improve your website’s performance, security, and user experience. However, these four general maintenance tasks are the most critical, if you want to keep your site free from clutter and in top shape.

1. Back Up Your Website

Backups are snapshots of your website at a specific moment in time, and they enable you to revert your site to a previous state if anything goes wrong. Creating regular backups is the most critical thing you can do to secure your site. They can help you fix bugs, solve security issues, reverse data losses, and much more.

Most people know they should back up their data, of course, but it can be easy to put off doing so. That’s where plugins such as UpdraftPlus come in handy. On top of providing you with multiple options for storing your backups, it also enables you to schedule them so they happen automatically.

A while back, we wrote a guide on how to use UpdraftPlus, and we recommend checking it out. If this tool isn’t to your liking, however, there are plenty of alternatives you can try. Regardless of which plugin you use, you should aim to create weekly backups at the very least.

2. Delete Your Discarded Post Drafts and Trashed Articles

All the information on your WordPress website goes into your database. This means that every post, page, comment, link, and so on that you add will contribute to bloating your database over time. The more cluttered your database is, the longer it will take to find the information you (or your users) actually want. For this reason, you should clean out unnecessary data as often as possible.

WordPress likes to keep discarded post drafts and trashed articles around for 30 days by default. However, it’s better to take out the trash more often than that, which means permanently deleting the content you won’t need anymore.

To do this, go to the Posts page in your dashboard, and select the Trash tab. Inside, you can check all the pieces you want to get rid of:

Then select Delete Permanently,and click on Apply. Emptying your trash can make a real difference to performance, and it helps keep your website clutter-free.

3. Update and Clear Out Your Plugins and Themes

One of the best things about using WordPress is the sheer amount of fantastic plugins and themes you get access to. However, some sites contain dozens of plugins and themes, many of which aren’t actually used or are outdated.

You should always make sure your plugins and themes are updated. Old versions of plugins often cease to work or cause problems, so you want to avoid using them. If you have plugins and themes that you no longer need, on the other hand, you should remove them altogether.

You can manage both of these tasks from the Plugins and Appearance > Themes tabs respectively. Inside, you’ll find notifications when one of your plugins or themes has an update available:

Likewise, you can select the plugins and themes you don’t use and delete them. This will also help you avoid unnecessary security risks.

4. Check Your Posts and Pages for Broken Links

Finally, some of the external links you’ve added to your content may stop working over time. The website a link points to might have gone offline, changed address, or simply deleted that particular page.

Once the plugin is running, it will notify you when it finds broken links (either via the dashboard or email). You can then remove or replace them with new links right away.

Conclusion

Keeping a website running smoothly isn’t as complicated as you might think. You can automate most maintenance tasks using plugins, and the rest can be carried out in a few minutes. If you take time to regularly clean out the pipes, so to speak, your website should always run at top performance.

When it comes to keeping your WordPress site in top shape, here are the four maintenance tasks you’ll want to perform regularly:

Back up your website.

Delete your discarded drafts and trashed articles.

Update your plugins and themes, and delete the ones you’re not using.

Check your posts and pages for broken links.

Do you have any questions about how to keep your WordPress website running smoothly? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!

]]>https://www.a2hosting.com/blog/wordpress-maintenance-tasks/feed/0https://www.a2hosting.com/blog/content/uploads/2018/02/wordpress-maintenance-150x150.pngHow to Manage Your WordPress Site Using WP-CLIhttps://www.a2hosting.com/blog/wp-cli/
https://www.a2hosting.com/blog/wp-cli/#respondWed, 27 Sep 2017 18:15:10 +0000https://www.a2hosting.com/blog/?p=3359WordPress is a fairly easy platform to pick up, yet difficult to master. If you want your site to succeed, you’ll need to juggle a lot of responsibilities, such as creating new content, keeping things updated, and managing your themes and plugins. It’s a lot of work, so anything that can help you do these …

]]>WordPress is a fairly easy platform to pick up, yet difficult to master. If you want your site to succeed, you’ll need to juggle a lot of responsibilities, such as creating new content, keeping things updated, and managing your themes and plugins. It’s a lot of work, so anything that can help you do these tasks more efficiently should be welcome.

That’s where the WordPress Command Line (WP-CLI) comes in. This tool enables you to handle all your managerial duties from the command line using a few keywords. Even if you’re not a developer, this approach can save you a lot of time. For example, you can install new plugins in a matter of seconds without accessing your dashboard.

In this article, we’re going to talk more about what WP-CLI does and how it works. Then, we’ll teach you how to set it up and use it in four simple steps. Let’s get to work!

An Introduction to WP-CLI

WP-CLI is a tool that enables you to control your WordPress setup through a command line interface. Once you’ve set it up, you can manage most of your day-to-day tasks using simple commands such as wp core update, which updates your version of WordPress to the latest one – without you having to access your dashboard.

These days, most of you probably don’t use your Operating System’s (OS) command line tools at all. However, doing so isn’t complicated. You simply have to memorize a few commands or keep WP-CLI’s documentation handy, and you’ll be able to use the tool like a pro.

Price:

WP-CLI is 100% free and open-source.

How to Use WP-CLI to Manage Your WordPress Site (in 4 Steps)

Before we jump into the tutorial, it’s worth noting that not every hosting environment is capable of running WP-CLI. If you’re on a shared hosting plan, you likely won’t be able to use it, and we’ll discuss why during the first step.

Step 1: Install WP-CLI

To set up WP-CLI, you’ll need a hosting environment that meets the following criteria:

A Unix-based environment, although there’s limited support for Windows servers.

The first three criteria are easy enough to meet, and most web hosts are up to spec. However, not every provider grants its users SSH access, and chances are yours won’t either unless you’re running a Virtual Private Server (VPS). Keep in mind that WordPress-friendly web hosts are more likely to support the use of WP-CLI. For example, we enable you to use the tool on our WordPress plans.

Assuming you have SSH access, you’ll need to use either your command line (if you’re on a Unix system) or a tool such as Putty to connect to your server. Then, run the following command:

This will download the files you need to install WP-CLI to your server. Now, let’s turn that .phar file into an executable with a second command:

chmod +x wp-cli.phar

Finally, we’re going to use the third command to move our executable to a new folder called wp:

sudo mv wp-cli.phar /usr/local/bin/wp

Now we can call up WP-CLI from our command line by typing mv. For example, typing wp -info should tell you which version of WP-CLI you’re running, and it’s a good way to confirm if your installation is ready to go.

Step 2: Update WordPress’ Core

If you made it to this step, the hardest part is already done. You simply need to learn some basic commands to start using WP-CLI to make your life easier. The first thing you should do is check if you’re running the latest version of WordPress core. To do that, type the following into your command line:

wp core check-update

If there’s a new version available, WP-CLI will notify you, and you’ll be able to install it using this command:

wp core update

Now WP-CLI will work its magic, and your site will be running the latest version of WordPress. It’s that simple.

Step 3: Manage Your Plugins and Themes

Installing a plugin or a theme using your dashboard takes multiple steps. You have to go to their respective tabs, find the right plugin or theme (or upload them), click a couple of buttons, wait for the process to end, and activate them. However, when you’re using WP-CLI, all it takes is a single command to install and activate. For example:

wp theme install twentyseventeen --activate

You can separate the above into two commands, but it’s more efficient to do it in one fell swoop. If you want to install a plugin, replace the words theme and twentyseventeen. Let’s use another example to illustrate:

wp plugin install hello-dolly --activate

The terms we use to identify both plugins and themes are called ‘slugs’. For example, twentyseventeen is the slug for the WordPress Twenty Seventeen theme. To find out the slug for any plugin or theme, you’ll need to use the WP-CLI search command, like this:

wp theme search twenty seventeen

In this case, the query should return a list including the Twenty Seventeen theme and its corresponding slug. As usual, you can replace the theme parameter with plugin if you need to. As far as updating themes and plugins, you can do it with this interchangeable command:

wp theme update --all

That’s all you need to know to get started managing your plugins and themes using WP-CLI, but the tool offers many more parameters you can use. Check out its documentation to find out more about them.

Step 4: Create New Posts

Finally, all that’s left for now is to create your first post using WP-CLI. As you can imagine, this can be done using a single command:

wp post create --post_title='My test post'

In this case, the post_title parameter enables you to set a title for your post right away. Afterward, WP-CLI will return a success message indicating the ID of your post (such as Success: Created post 1900).

To edit your post’s content, you’ll need to use the following command:

wp post edit 1900

This will automatically launch your system’s default editor. Depending on your OS, using these text editors can be complicated, so if you’re working on an elaborate post, you might want to use the WordPress dashboard to polish things up.

Conclusion

Running a WordPress website can be a lot of work, but there’s no reason why you can’t find ways to tackle it more efficiently. For example, using the command line can save you time over the long run by enabling you to handle repetitive tasks with a few keyboard strokes. Plus, there’s plenty more you can do with WP-CLI if you take the time to read its full documentation.

Here’s what you need to do to get started using WP-CLI:

Install the tool.

Update WordPress’ core.

Manage your plugins and themes.

Create new posts.

Do you have any questions about how to manage your WordPress site using WP-CLI? Ask away in the comments section below!